Compression of moving digitalized pictures, e.g. video pictures, is a field that becomes of interest when they are to be transmitted. This is due to the large amount of information associated with a single image or frame of the moving picture and the restrictions to the bandwidths of the channels on which they are transmitted. Thus, when the capacity of the channel used is lower than the capacity required for transmitting the moving pictures as they are, some kind of compression will be needed.
Fortunately there is much redundancy associated with moving pictures, both within a single frame, spatial redundancy, and between successive frames of the moving picture, temporal redundancy. Exploitation of these redundancies will result in a reduction of the information, and hence a lower bit rate will be required.